We study two major issues in retail inventory management: (1) The optimal set of variants (the assortment problem), that is, how many and which variants should be carried by retailers; and (2) the optimal inventory policy, given a set of variants. It is well known that it is difficult to reach analytically tractable solutions solving these problems because of the randomness in the total market ...

In a language identification task, native Belgian French and native Swiss French speakers identified French from France as their own variety. However, Canadian French was not subject to this bias. Canadian and French listeners didn't claim a different variety as their own.

the paper sets forth in detail categorically-algebraic or catalg foundations for the operations of taking the image and preimage of (fuzzy) sets called forward and backward powerset operators. motivated by an open question of s. e. rodabaugh, we construct a monad on the category of sets, the algebras of which generate the fixed-basis forward powerset operator of l. a. zadeh. on the next step, w...

Using the Matrix-Assisted Pulsed Laser Evaporation (MAPLE) process developed at the Naval Research Laboratory, carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube composite thin films have been successfully fabricated. This process involves dissolving or suspending the film material in a volatile solvent, freezing the mixture to create a solid target, and using a low fluence pulsed laser to evaporate the targ...

Two types of porous ceramic scaffolds were prepared, consisting of β-tricalcium phosphate (TCP) or the mixed powder of TCP and hydroxyapatite (HA) at a 2:1 mass ratio. A variety of methods have been used to fabricate bone scaffolds, while the sintering approach was adopted in this work. An extremely high temperature was used on sintering that proposed to consolidate the ceramic particles. As re...

Availability of a wide variety of Web services over the Internet offers opportunities of providing new value added services built by composing them out of existing ones. Service composition poses a number of challenges. A composite service can be very complex in structure, containing many temporal and data-flow dependencies between their constituent services. Furthermore, each individual servic...

The purpose of this short communication is to demonstrate the importance of numerical analysis and wavelength increment selection when characterizing fluorescent dissolved organic matter (FDOM) using fluorescence excitation-emission matrix (EEM) regional integration. A variety of water samples, representing a landscape gradient and different types of FDOM, were analyzed for their percentage dis...

The widespread use of aesthetic f illings has highlighted their advantages and disadvantages. One of the most troublesome features of earlier aesthetic materials was the difficulty of finishing the restoration surface to decrease adherence of food debris. The rougher the finished surface, the greater the possibility of bacterial accumulation and discolouration of restoration along the restorati...